Marye's Heights his magnificent army
swept at double quick. The Confederate batteries had been specially
trained to rake this road from three directions, right, and left flank
and centre.

Steadily, stoically the men in blue pressed into this narrow way in
silence and met the flaming torrent from three directions. Rushing on
over the bodies of their fallen comrades the thinning ranks reached the
old stone wall at the foot of the hill. General Cobb lay concealed
behind it with three thousand infantry. The low quick order ran along
his line:

"Fire!"

Straight into the faces of the heroic Union soldiers flashed a level
blinding flame from three thousand muskets, slaying, crushing, tearing
to pieces the proud army of an hour ago. A thousand men in blue fell in
five minutes. The ground was piled with their bodies until it was
impossible to charge over them effectively.

For a moment a cloud of smoke pitifully drew a soft grey veil over the
awful scene while the men who were left fell back in straggling broken
groups.

Five times the Union hosts had charged those terrible brown hills and
five times they had been rolled back in red waves of blood.

Late in the day a fierce bitter wind was blowing from the north. There
was yet time to turn defeat into victory. The desperate Union Commander
ordered the sixth charge.

The men in blue pulled their hats down low as if to shut out the pelting
hail of lead and iron and without a murmur charged once more into the
mouth of hell. The winds had frozen stiff the bodies of their dead. The
advancing blue lines snatched these dead men from the ground, carried
them in front, stacked them in long piles for bulwarks, and fought
behind them with the desperation of madmen. There was no escape. The
keen eyes of the Confederate Commanders had planted their right and left
flanking lines to pour death into these ranks no matter how high their
corpses were piled. The crescent hill blazed and roared with unceasing
fury. Only the darkness was kind at last.

And then the men in blue planted the frozen bodies of their comrades
along the outer battle line as dummy sentinels, and under cover of the
night began to slip back through Fredericksburg and across the silver
mirror of the Rappahannock to their old camp, shattered, broken,
crushed.

It was four o'clock in the morning before John Vaughan's regiment would
give up the search for their desperately wounded. Only the strongest
could endure t